Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,87

in love he could die.

* * *

Alex falls out of bed the following morning with a low-grade hangover and one of Henry’s swimsuits tangled around his elbow. They did, technically, sleep in separate bunks. They just didn’t start there.

Over the kitchen sink, he chugs a glass of water and stares out the window, the sun blinding and bright on the lake, and there’s an incandescent little stone of certainty at the bottom of his chest.

It’s this place—the absolute separation from DC, the familiar old smells of cedar trees and dried chile de árbol, the sanity of it. The roots. He could go outside and dig his fingers into the springy ground and understand anything about himself.

And he does understand, really. He loves Henry, and it’s nothing new. He’s been falling in love with Henry for years, probably since he first saw him in glossy print on the pages of J14, almost definitely since Henry pinned Alex to the floor of a medical supply closet and told him to shut the hell up. That long. That much.

He smiles as he reaches for a frying pan, because he knows it’s exactly the kind of insane risk he can’t resist.

By the time Henry comes wandering into the kitchen in his pajamas, there’s an entire breakfast spread on the long green table, and Alex is at the stove, flipping his dozenth pancake.

“Is that an apron?”

Alex flourishes toward the polka-dotted thing he’s got on over his boxers with his free hand, as if showing off one of his tailored suits. “Morning, sweetheart.”

“Sorry,” Henry says. “I was looking for someone else. Handsome, petulant, short, not pleasant until after ten a.m.? Have you seen him?”

“Fuck off, five-nine is average.”

Henry crosses the room with a laugh and nudges up behind him at the stove to peck him on the cheek. “Love, you and I both know you’re rounding up.”

It’s only a step on the way to the coffeemaker, but Alex reaches back and gets a hand in Henry’s hair before he can move, pulling him into a kiss on the mouth this time. Henry huffs a little in surprise but returns it fully.

Alex forgets, momentarily, about the pancakes and everything else, not because he wants to do absolutely filthy things to Henry—maybe even with the apron still on—but because he loves him, and isn’t that wild, to know that that’s what makes the filthy things so good.

“I didn’t realize this was a jazz brunch,” says Nora’s voice suddenly, and Henry springs backward so fast he almost puts his ass in the bowl of batter. She sidles up to the forgotten coffeemaker, grinning slyly at them.

“That doesn’t seem sanitary,” June is saying with a yawn as she folds herself into a chair at the table.

“Sorry,” Henry says sheepishly.

“Don’t be,” Nora tells him.

“I’m not,” Alex says.

“I’m hungover,” June says as she reaches for the pitcher of mimosas. “Alex, you did all this?”

Alex shrugs, and June squints at him, bleary but knowing.

That afternoon, over the sounds of the boat’s engine, Henry talks to Alex’s dad about the sailboats that jut up from the horizon, getting into a complex discussion on outboard motors that Alex can’t hope to follow. He leans back against the bow and watches, and it’s so easy to imagine it: a future Henry who comes to the lake house with him every summer, who learns how to make elotes and ties neat cleat hitches and fits right into place in his weird family.

They go swimming, yell over one another about politics, pass the guitar around again. Henry takes a photo of himself with June and Nora, one under each arm and both in their bikinis. Nora is holding his chin in one hand and licking the side of his face, and June has her fingers tangled up in his hair and her head in the crook of his neck, smiling angelically at the camera. He sends it to Pez and receives anguished keysmashes and crying emojis in response, and they all almost piss themselves laughing.

It’s good. It’s really, really good.

Alex lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything